Exploring Emotions in Social Media

We have seen an explosion of communication on social media in the past few years. In particular, people use Twitter to share information and experiences, express their opinions, and say how they feel. This wealth of data of how people feel and experience various events can provide valuable information to support mental health research. In this paper, we show how we can explore the emotional state of a population by mining the vast amount of available public social media data in real time. The We Feel system is able to capture and process up to 45,000 tweets per minute, and show their emotional content live in an interactive visualisation. The data can be used to explore how people respond to certain events and support mental health research.